How Families Cope With Notorious Relatives

Keith Jesperson was arrested in 1995 and sentenced to life in prison for killing eight women.

AP

Originally published on May 16, 2013 4:49 pm

What is it like to be suddenly and irreversibly thrust into the public spotlight for something truly horrible done by a relative?

"I could hear my last name being whispered in the hallway, and I heard 'murder,' just under people's breath," says Melissa Moore, daughter of Keith Hunter Jesperson, who was sentenced to life in prison for the killing of at least eight women over a five-year period.

After her father's crime became widely known, her classmates shunned her. "Then I really started to feel like it's my fault," Moore says. "That somehow I'm guilty by association. That somehow I'm the reason they don't want to be around me."

She changed schools and kept her relationship with her father a secret, "until my daughter finally started asking me questions when I'm a young mother and that's when I started to speak out."

David Kaczynski was the person who turned in his brother after realizing that the Unabomber's published manifesto had eerie similarities to brother Ted's writing.

"There was a great deal of soul searching," he says of the decision to turn his brother in to authorities, adding that he had a feeling of "moral imperative to stop the violence, but [I didn't want] ... to do violence against my brother."

For one thing, he was afraid that his elderly mother would never forgive him.

"I truly feared that I would lose her love if I told her," he says. Instead, she "got up out of her chair and put a kiss on my cheek."